Prof. Paul Oh is a full professor, ASME Fellow and Associate Department Head at Drexel's
Mechanical Engineering Department. He received mechanical engineering degrees from McGill
(B.Eng 1989), Seoul National (M.Sc 1992), and Columbia (PhD 1999) universities. Honors include
faculty fellowships at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (2002), Naval Research Lab (2003), the NSF CAREER
award (2004), the SAE Ralph Teetor Award for Engineering Education Excellence (2005) and being
named a Boeing Welliver Fellow (2006). He is the Director of the Drexel Autonomous Systems Lab
and also the Founding Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Aerial Robotics and UAVs.
From 2008-2010, he served at the National Science Foundation (NSF) as the Program Director
managing the robotics research portfolio. He has authored over 70 referred archival papers and
edited 2 books in the areas of robotics and unmanned systems. He serves as Editor for several
leading robotics publications including Springer-Verlag's Journal of Intelligent Robotics and
Systems and the Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics. He also served as Director for the NATO
Advanced Studies Institute (ASI) in 2010 on Unmanned Systems which gathered researchers from
over 20 countries to capture the state of the art and formulate research roadmaps. In 2012, he
served as Program Chair for the flagship conference for the academic robotics community, the
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), held in St. Paul, MN, USA. He
is currently lead of Team DRC-Hubo for the 2012-2014 DARPA Robotics Challenge.
In recognition of his international partnerships and impact on US research and education, he was
one of three Distinguished Lecturers invited by the National Science Board to speak at their 60th
Anniversary in 2010.

Abstract :

Motivated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) kicked-off the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) in October 2012. This world-wid
e challenge presents 8 events ranging from vehicle-driving to firehose-handling that a robot must
perform in the event human first-responders cannot mitigate the disaster. The first trials were held December 20-21, 2013 in Miami, Florida where 17 robots demonstrated performance. This talk
will highlight Team DRC-Hubo's 15-month development effort and lessons learned from the first tr
ial.